The door of the club swung shut behind them.
Oswald walked slowly, shoulders drawn in. The night air was cold and his jaw still ached from the wire.
"Will."
He said it to the pavement.
"I'm sorry. I nearly got us both—"
"Stop."
Will stretched his arms above his head, rolling his neck, letting the cold pre-dawn air do what it was going to do. Three weeks in Gotham and he'd been shot at, dropped into a sewer, nearly eaten, sedated, and seated across a dinner table from a man who'd pressed a carving knife to his throat. He was tired in layers.
"Your read on Falcone was correct," he said. "The crack between them is real. And we accomplished what we came for — plus a job and a roof over the next several months. That's not a bad night."
"I grabbed the gun," Oswald said. "I almost shot him."
"You didn't."
"Because of you."
"Yes." No point pretending otherwise. "But you handed it over. That was you."
Oswald finally looked up. His eyes were still doing the bulging thing, but the mania had drained out of them, replaced by something hollower and more honest.
"I don't know if I can do what he's asking. Maroni has people everywhere. The moment we start collecting evidence against him, he'll hear about it. We'll be dead inside a week."
Will looked at him for a long moment.
Then he said: "Hey. Little Penguin."
Oswald's expression did something complicated.
"What did you call me."
"I said little penguin. The short legs, the nose, the coat — you see it, right? Very penguin. Very small penguin."
The vein in Oswald's forehead was visible.
"Will," he said, very carefully, "I would like you to explain, right now, why—"
"Can't grow an inch but lost your nerve too?" Will continued pleasantly. "Going to go home and cry? Very sad. Very penguin behavior."
The first punch caught Will in the cheekbone and his head went sideways.
He didn't block it.
He hit back.
Oswald didn't block that either.
What followed was not a fight in any technical sense — no footwork, no guard, no attempt to avoid damage. It was two people standing in the street at one in the morning hitting each other as hard as they could, absorbing each return blow without flinching, neither one moving away. An agreement to take everything the other person had until the other person ran out.
It lasted ten minutes.
Oswald sat down first. Not fell — sat, deliberately, like a man who had made a decision about where he wanted to be.
Will sat down next to him.
They looked at each other across a short distance in the streetlight.
Oswald had two new bruises closing over his right eye socket, several more across the jaw, and a split at the corner of his mouth. He was breathing through his nose because the other option hurt.
Will's face had been rearranged in a direction that was not an improvement. His nose had moved. He probed it with two fingers, determined it was intact and merely displaced, and decided to address that later.
They both started laughing at approximately the same time, which made everything hurt more.
"You absolute son of a—"
"You went down first," Will said. "Just noting that."
"I had a broken jaw going into this—"
"Noted. Still went down first."
Oswald picked up a handful of gravel and threw it at him. Will blocked it with his forearm and the laughter got worse.
When it faded, the street was quiet. The pressure of the last week had gone somewhere — not resolved, not fixed, just released into the cold air.
Oswald straightened up.
"You're right," he said. "Falcone, Maroni, the whole thing — we don't do it because we owe anyone. We do it because it's ours. Because that position is ours and we're going to take it."
Will nodded. This was what he'd been waiting for.
He'd thought about it during the long walk from the river. A city without Batman was a city without equilibrium — the forces that generated crime had nothing pushing back against them except individual officers with insufficient resources and no structural support. Gordon and Bullock could do their jobs perfectly and it would never be enough.
If the darkness wasn't going to be fought from above, it needed to be organized from within. Order built from criminal material, by people who understood the system from the inside. Oswald, ascending by skill and will rather than inheritance, was the right person for that throne.
Will was going to put him there.
Three days passed.
The bruises on Will's face cycled through yellow and green toward something more presentable, and the ribs, which had been a significant problem, reduced to a manageable one.
He went to Gordon's house first, to return the borrowed money.
Gordon was out on shift. Barbara answered the door in the Winnie the Pooh shirt, registered that his face had been through something, and made the reasonable decision not to ask about it. She heated a pan instead and made him crêpes with strawberry filling, which he ate at the kitchen table while she told him about her plans.
Police academy. She'd been accepted. Classes started after summer.
He congratulated her and meant it and didn't say the other things — that in a version of this world she would eventually work alongside a masked vigilante, that she would be injured in ways that changed her life's direction, that she would become something remarkable through costs he wouldn't wish on anyone. None of that was settled here. This world had different parameters.
Maybe she would just be a good cop like her father.
He left the money on the table with a note and let himself out.
The hospital had Bullock's room number on the board.
Will knocked. No answer. He looked in: empty, bed made, IV stand pushed aside.
He found Bullock at the nurses' station on the same floor, weight on a crutch, the other hand gesturing through what appeared to be a very engaged account of something. The nurse listening to him had the expression of someone who was professionally tolerant and personally finding this more interesting than expected.
Will set the fruit basket on the counter within Bullock's peripheral vision.
Bullock's eye moved to it, then to him.
Will gave a small nod.
Bullock gave one back.
Will left.
The address on the back of the note took him to the fashion district in midtown — a clean building with a yoga studio occupying most of the third floor.
He arrived near closing. The last clients were rolling up their mats and filing out. Inside, Selina was still on her mat, alone in front of the mirror.
She was holding her ankles and pulling her body into a bow — back arched, arms fully extended, the form technically demanding and currently executed without visible effort. The grey athletic tank was dark at the collar, the line of her spine visible through the fabric as she breathed.
The Catwoman who had descended into a sewer shaft and put two rounds into an augmented man's eye socket three days ago was the same person as the woman pulling herself into a perfect backbend in the afternoon light, and Will found this somehow more remarkable than either act in isolation.
He stood in the doorway for a while.
When she straightened and turned her head, she'd apparently been aware of him for longer than was comfortable.
"Enjoying the view?"
"Michelangelo would have something to say about it," Will said honestly.
She picked up her towel. "Give me twenty minutes. We'll get dinner — I have questions."
They came out onto the street as the evening was settling in, the summer air carrying the specific warmth of a city that had retained the day's heat in its stone. Selina tilted her face up briefly and breathed out.
Her arm found his without appearing to look for it — the natural gesture of someone who was used to moving through the world in physical proximity to other people. Her fingers registered the arm they'd found and paused.
"You train."
"Apparently."
He'd noticed it himself, gradually. The body he was in had been built for something that went beyond aesthetic consideration. Under clothing you couldn't tell. Without it, the geometry was wrong for a normal person — the muscle density, the specific development of the stabilizer groups, the way the body seemed to have an opinion about every position it was placed in.
He had a theory he hadn't fully formed.
Wayne Manor had been empty. The cave had been empty. Alfred had been nowhere. Wayne Enterprises had gates he couldn't pass.
And yet — the physique. The reflexes that had shown up under pressure in the sewer. The instincts that had assembled the right answers at Falcone's table in real time.
He didn't pursue the thought further. He'd decided not to. The question of whether he was carrying Bruce Wayne's body around Gotham was less important than the certainty of what the answer would require of him if true. He didn't want the mission. He wasn't Batman. He was going to help Oswald build something functional from the material available, and leave the cape on the floor.
"What do you want to eat?" Selina asked.
He thought about it. The restaurants of Gotham had been feeding him adequately for three months. Nothing had tasted like home.
"Dumplings," he said.
She looked at him sideways. "Chinatown might have them. Other side of the Brown Bridge — straight through the center."
He was already calculating the subway route.
The engine came to life before he got three steps.
He turned.
She had the helmet on and the Ducati Diavel running, the bike trembling with the idle — matte black, low and long, the exhaust note deep enough to feel in the chest. She looked at him with the helmet visor up, one eyebrow raised.
Will whistled.
"Are you getting on," she said, "or are you planning to admire it from over there?"